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Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#81

Post by SilasX »

klooney wrote: post #40
tiffanyh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors. That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments. (To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who…

At my university, they did, I don't think it's that uncommon.

Right, there’s the longstanding joke about whether you’re taking real geology vs “rocks for jocks”.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#82

Post by sansnomme »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68
tiffanyh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors. That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments. (To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who…

At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take. I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors…

They need to get rid of the concept of weed out courses. It's bad for learning. If you are paying 30-50K a year for an education, course availability should be a given. Don't use the bell curve as an excuse to deny students an education, or if you are going to use a threshold, use a fixed one, not one that limits by percentage of students. The fat cat admins and professors need to be fired. Too many schools take the students' money and plow it into research and other areas, with zero regard for undergraduate education. "You are in university now, it's sink or swim. Can't make it? Too bad." This attitude is especially prevalent in the state/public unis, especially places like Berkeley where demands exceeds supply. Your traditional private colleges like Dartmouth and Harvard don't have this problem.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#83

Post by avs733 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #31
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to be. There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Teaching algorithm design in that class is not particularly useful to a biologist who ju…

for non-majors isn't radical. "Stats for business" "PE for physicists" Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?

>PE for physicists

You meant juggling and fencing?

A more pragmatic answer is who’s going to teach it? Someone with weak skills in the discipline? Or someone with weak skills in computing? (This is a glib answer)

Finding people at the true intersection is surprisingly hard, and those people tend to be busy.

In grad school I took and advanced statistics course in the psych department. The concepts were new to me but not to the folks in the discipline. However the math (matrix multiplication) and basic coding were easy for me and very hard for them.

There was only one person in the department who could teach it, other faculty did that type of work entirely as “clients” which just ran tools and code from others.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#84

Post by herdrick »

herdrick wrote: post #25
herdrick wrote: post #22

Matthias Felleisen, architect (I think) of the current curriculum, explains to a hypothetical skeptical university administrator the virtues of it: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/py.html

(... in the style of his The Little Schemer et al. books)

This is so sad.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#86

Post by andrewstuart »

tptacek wrote: post #65
chris_wot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to teach OO in Java, I fail to see why teaching design patterns is so awful.

I mostly point it out as a reason why teaching OO as a fundamental is a bad idea in the first place.

But OO is a fundamental, even if it isn’t longer gospel.

OO is important and if I’m three years of computer science there’s no time to teach it then you have to ask what you’d heck they are doing.

OO is everywhere and it’s an important software concept and is the right solution for certain classes of problem.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#87

Post by InkCanon »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68
tiffanyh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors. That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments. (To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who…

At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take. I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors…

Weed out courses do have various problems. Some of it is regulatory - certain public or public funded universities don't let you eliminate large portions of your cohort. Graduation rate is a part of many college rankings, so there's also an incentive to not fail.

I don't think it's completely wrong. Failing a student after he or she sunk a ton of money into it is really not ideal. IMO it seems really easy to pass prospective students the first few chapters of your CS textbook/lectures then test them as a prerequisite for enrollment, before they enrol. This would be close to free, filter out a lot of would be dropouts and just save money and effort all around.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#88

Post by rgovostes »

My university's CS program was taught in Ancient C++. This was fine for the Comp Sci majors, but the intro-level class was required for all science majors. I fielded many pleas for help on homework assignments and saw that many struggled so much with the (let's be honest, incredibly unintuitive) syntax and inscrutable compiler errors, that they couldn't internalize the more fundamental concepts that the course was trying to teach.

Later on, I joined the curriculum committee and argued for it to be taught in Python. The faculty weren't convinced at the time but I see now that eventually they moved the intro course to Python and kept the later courses in C++, which seems like a wise decision. Python is far more approachable and will serve science students well if they ever need to use Pandas etc. (The second-semester C++ course has you implement the STL container types, which is an extremely valuable exercise.)

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#89

Post by kevinventullo »

fireburning wrote: post #54
ramses0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated with a degree in CS. Checking back with my university they'd added a degree in Software Engineering. CS (traditionally) is more about algorithms, limits, growth. There's a bunch of complexity in even just understanding and calculating what a computer can do. The Software Engineering degree makes so much sense if you're studying about how libraries can be tied together, upgraded, unit/integration testing,…

sorry if this sounds dumb I don't have any formal education why is there a distinction? when i hear computer science i hear the study of computers that in my head means software, hardware, and theory it's like having doctors that study humans theoretically and others that do surgery

I think the analogy

Software Engineers : Doctors :: Computer Scientists : Biologists/Biomedical Scientists

is perhaps reasonable.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#90

Post by treyd »

mjdiloreto wrote: post #43

The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic t…

Taking Shivers' Fundies I class was mind blowing, even as a student that had been programming for several years already. They should have put him and Barzilay (who I had for PL and then later TAed under) in charge of the curriculum update.
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